The long-term impact of the work proposed will be to make the conformational information contained in molecular data bases more accessible and more useful to biomedical investigators interested in the functioning of living systems at the molecular level. The conformational properties of molecules play a very important role in determining the functional activity of an enzyme and the way in which one molecule recognizes and interacts with another. This pilot study should facilitate the development of tools which will be of great value to the pharmacologist or medicinal chemist in designing new drugs, or to the clinical research worker exploring the molecular basis of diseases. The specific aims of the study are to show how a mathematical formalism, known as Distance Geometry, can be applied to the problem of retrieving conformational information from a molecular data base, in an efficient manner. The efficiency will come from the fact that the formalism, (which is based on the testing of distance information for three-dimensional consistency), can be used to establish the existence of a conformation with specific properties, without resorting to the generation and testing of trial structures. The formalism is also capable of dealing effectively with non-rigid structures.